An American Brat (29 page)

“I think I've had about all I can take!” Feroza said, pushing her chair back noisily.

Zareen suddenly felt so wretchedly alone in this faraway country. “I should have listened. I should never have let you go so far
away. Look what it's done to you — you've become an American brat!”

David, who had entered the kitchen at this point to get some cookies, decided he could do without them, and silently withdrew to be forgotten in his book-lined garage.

“I don't know how I'll face the family,” Zareen cried. “I don't know what my friends will think!”

“I don't care a fuck what they think!”

Zareen stared at her daughter open-mouthed, visibly shaken by the crude violence of her language. “I never thought that I'd live to hear you speak like this, Feroza!” She stood up and walked from the kitchen with the stately bearing of a much taller woman.

After a while, Feroza followed her into the room they shared and hugged her mother. The corner of the pillow was soaked with Zareen's tears.

“I'm sorry, Mum. I didn't mean that,” Feroza said, herself weeping. “I don't know what came over me.”

Chastened by the storm of emotion they had generated and the unexpected violence of the words exchanged, each called a frightened, silent truce. Neither brought up the subject for the rest of the evening. David had wisely elected to stay out of their way and had left the house altogether. Feroza, though made wretched by his absence, appreciated it. It was best that she be alone with her mother.

They talked late into the night of family matters, of Feroza's progress in her studies, her expenses (that Zareen termed astronomical), of the scholarship she was angling for; and, carefully circling the subject of marriage, each ventured, gingerly, to mention David. Feroza casually threw in a remark about David when the opportunity presented itself, and Zareen just as casually tossed in a question or two to show she bore him no ill will and was prepared to be objective.

“David has wonderful road sense. I don't know how I'd manage to find my way without him,” Feroza said at one point. “In fact, he'd love to show you around. He can explain things better than any guide.”

“That would be nice,” Zareen said carefully, and on a note so tentative that Feroza expected her to continue. She looked at her mother with a touch of surprise, and quickly Zareen said, “But will he be able to find the time?”

“Of course he will. He's planned to keep the weekend free for you.”

Feroza had already explained how hard David worked. Besides devoting every moment he could spare to his studies, he held two jobs — one as a research assistant to a professor of computer science and another with a construction firm — to pay for the expenses not covered by a scholarship. Feroza cast down her eyes, “His father can pay his tuition, but he won't.” She knew she was stretching a point; Jewish parents set a premium on education, and David's father would have paid the fees if he could. “He feels David must earn his way through the university. Actually that's why David sold the car to me. He travels by bicycle.”

“Quite right.” Zareen approved the parental decision and David's attitude. “It will teach him to stand on his own two feet.”

It was an attitude Parsee fathers would encourage. If Zareen were to believe all the allusions slipped in by Feroza, David had the brains of a genius, the temperament of a saint, and the most brilliant prospects in computers of anyone in Denver.

“He seems like a nice boy,” Zareen said graciously, and Feroza, delighted by this quantum leap in his favor, hummed as she brushed her teeth. She heard Laura and Shirley move unobtrusively in their room. She saw the light that had come on in David's garage go out. Hugging her mother good night, saying, “And DO let the bugs bite!” Feroza laughed so raucously at her own stale joke that it infected the small frame house with her joy, and Shirley and Laura, talking softly in their room, suddenly found themselves giggling at the least little thing.

David, who was inclined to bouts of gloom and self-doubt, felt the thunderous cloud that had descended on him after his encounter with Zareen — convinced he had made the worst impression possible — lift somewhat. He smiled in the dark and
longed to be with Feroza. He hoped she would slip into his room later.

But hugging her soft American pillow that never rumpled in the narrow camp cot next to her mother's bed, Feroza blew him a silent kiss and fell peacefully asleep.

Zareen, who had to cope with a twelve-hour time difference, was wide awake at two o'clock in the morning. It came as a bit of a shock to her to think that it was already Saturday afternoon in Lahore. Cyrus would be taking his after-lunch nap, undisturbed by the mosque's rowdy stereo system.

Zareen was always amazed, and mildly resentful, at how peacefully her husband slept through the blasts while she shot up in bed, her heart thumping. Sometimes, when one of the family was sick, she sent messages requesting the mullah to tone down the volume. Being a frequenter of the mosque, the bearded cook wielded influence with his pals, and Zareen enjoyed the illusion that she exercised some control over her environment.

Zareen found the quiet in her strange surroundings in Denver eerie, the opaque, dawnlike glow of the night sky reflecting the tireless city lights disorienting.

In Lahore at this hour, the pitch dark night would be alive with a cacophony of insect and mammal noises, with the thump of the watchman's lathi stick or the shrill note of his whistle. The population explosion in Pakistan having extended itself also to the bird community, some bird, disturbed by a sudden light or by an animal prowling in the trees, was bound to be twittering, some insomniac rooster crowing. Zareen had never imagined she'd actually miss the mosque stereos or the insufferable racket of the rickshaws.

Covering her eyes and her ears in an old silk sari she kept for the purpose, Zareen summoned the imagined presences of her caring kinsfolk and filled the emptiness of her second night in America with their resolute and reassuring chatter. Their voices, trapped in the sari, rustled in her ears, buzzed in her brain, “Our prayers are with you. Be brave. Be firm. We must not lose our child.”

Fortified by the strength of their convictions and of their characters, visible in the images floating before her, she evaluated the perilous situation, fraught with difficulties neither they nor she could have possibly foreseen.

For one, Feroza had changed. Not overtly, but inside. For another, David was not as poor as his tattered pants had led them to believe. Besides, he would not be so easy to discredit. Feroza was convinced he was a paragon of all the virtues the community could ever have wished for in its sons — and the little Zareen had seen of the meek-looking fellow appeared calculated to confirm the impression.

She, of course, was not taken in by his docile exterior. She knew he had wicked little ways hidden some place, ready to kick up trouble!

As the remarks and the advice of the familial think tank echoed in her head and the words reconstituted themselves into new patterns that conveyed fresh instruction and new insights into the changed situation, Zareen was gradually soothed. She felt once again able to cope with the unforeseen circumstances. And, if it came to a pinch, living up to the trust reposed in her, she was confident she would improvise.

By the time she drifted off to sleep at about five in the morning, Zareen had glimpsed the rudiments of an idea that had the potential to succeed.

Feroza awoke her mother with a cup of tea. “It's ten o'clock, Mum. We've planned a lovely Saturday for you. David's ready.”

Zareen was at once wide-awake. Refreshed by her sleep, and subconsciously aware of having spent the night in fruitful endeavor, she was in a happier and more adventurous frame of mind. After all, she was in America! The New World beckoned irresistibly.

They breakfasted on omelettes and muffins at Pour La France, a yuppy hangout filled with the aroma of fresh gourmet coffee and the less aromatic presences of bearded professors and students in jogging shorts. David insisted on paying, and Feroza glowed. They lunched at Benihana, where the Japanese chef performed a fierce ballet with his sharp knives and the grilled mushrooms he tossed to their plates. The bill was impressive, and Zareen settled the question of payment once and for all by declaring, “When I'm with you, I'll pay. When you two start earning properly, you can pay.”

At night, Zareen sank her teeth into prime rib of beef at the classy Brown Palace Hotel downtown and rolled up her eyes at its succulence. She tasted the Rocky Mountain trout from Feroza's plate. Never had she tasted the natural flavors of meat and vegetables quite this way, always eating them drowned in delectable concoctions of spices at home.

On Sunday, a day as bright and balmy as all the days she was to spend in Denver, they drove along a winding mountain road through pine-wood country made spectacular by rust-colored canyons and boulders, to Georgetown. It was a mining town that had flourished during the gold rush but was now mainly a tourist attraction. Preserved as on the day it was abandoned — and Zareen was sure it had been abandoned suddenly — the pictorial little downtown, with its hotels and saloons hung with Victorian light fixtures,
rough wood furniture, and marble bars, excited her imagination.

Guiding her tour with enthusiasm, blossoming beneath the warmly admiring gaze of his beloved and the interest shown by the sophisticated woman in a sari, David gave Zareen her first taste for the history of the land. So tied up and tangled the day before, his tongue became fluent, and he brought the Wild West vividly to life. His fumbling movements, too, were replaced by a surety that was natural to his compact body. And David, who had despaired in his dark bout of gloom of ever impressing Zareen, was as surprised as she was.

When Feroza, agile in jeans, asked Zareen to climb the steep struts after her into an old steam engine, David tactfully suggested, “You'd better not in that beautiful sari.”

“At least you have more sense than my daughter,” Zareen said tartly, and intercepted a look between them — of David's delight at winning her favor and Feroza's bemused surprise — that Zareen was not meant to see. Gloating at having scored over Feroza, David had thumbed his nose, and though Feroza tried to look hurt by the sudden switch in her mother's allegiance, it was plain to see she was pleased.

Each day the next week, Feroza dropped her mother off at one or another of the gleaming shopping malls. To Zareen's dazzled senses, they were pieces of paradise descended straight from the sky, crammed with all that was most desirable in the world.

Shooting off on a tangent, she darted between the garment racks and cosmetics counters, the jewelry, linen, toy, shoe, and furniture displays like a giddy meteorite driven mad by the gravitational allure of contending cosmic bodies. Caught in the whirlwind of her frenzy, she blew tirelessly in and out of the stores, attracted as much by the silver plastic slippers as she was by the grand pianos.

Feroza picked her up late in the evening from some designated spot, usually an ice-cream parlor, and eyes glazed by the glory of the goods she had seen and the foods she had tasted,
Zareen climbed into the small car, laden with large shopping bags.

The results of her first shopping spree were manifest that very evening. The tops of everything, counters, tables, window-sills, sprouted tissue boxes as if she had planted a pastel garden of fragrant Kleenex. She went from box to box, plucking tissues with a prodigality that satisfied a deep sensual craving and chucked them away with an abandon she never thought to indulge. She was seldom without a small ball of tissue crumpled in her fist or fluttering in her fingers. Some days later, impressed by the magic of scouring potions like Windex and Endust, she sprayed them on the tissues and spent an ecstatic evening cleaning the house.

Feroza's dressing table and bathroom shelves blossomed in a dizzying array of perfume bottles and cosmetics, and the level of the floor of Feroza's two long closets rose by at least two feet in a glossy flood of plastic packages containing linen, china, lamp shades, and gadgets. The hanging spaces were jammed with Zareen's new blouses, pants, and jackets.

Feroza discreetly moved her clothes to David's closet.

Enchanted, Zareen made her daily debut modeling her new clothes in the kitchen and was as delighted as a teenager by the approving glances and flattering comments of whoever happened to be breakfasting. She spent hours chatting with Laura and Shirley. They ferried her around when Feroza or David were busy, and she treated them to ice-cream cones and the tortilla chips, candy, and chocolate fudge colas she brought home. She bought small gifts for everyone.

Zareen was as happy as a captive seal suddenly released into the ocean. Despite her daily shopping forays and weekend excursions, she felt she had glimpsed only the tips of icebergs. Her heart pulsed to the seductive beat of the New World, and her ears, throbbing to the beat, stopped hearing the counsel of her distant Lahori relatives. The plotted course was forgotten; David's presence, unfailingly courteous and anxious to please, touchingly dependent on her opinion and responsive to her slightest need, was accepted, and necessary to this enchantment.

David and Feroza, exhilarated by their success, relaxed some of their self-imposed restraints. David held Feroza's hand, and glancing at her mother, Feroza permitted it to be held. She rested her head on David's shoulder when the ride was long, and occasionally hugged him in a sisterly fashion in front of Zareen.

Light-headed with delight, David let his hair, and even the stubble on his chin, grow. His confidence, too, blossomed, and with it, his wry sense of humor that had so touched Zareen in the abandoned mining town when he had gleefully thumbed his nose at Feroza. At such moments, Zareen wished David was a Parsee — or that the Zoroastrians would permit selective conversion to their faith.

Zareen found herself seriously questioning the ban on interfaith marriages for the first time. She had often opined how unfair it was that while a Parsee man who married a “non” could keep his faith and bring up his children as Zoroastrians, a Parsee woman couldn't. And it didn't make sense that the “non” non was not permitted to become Zoroastrian; one could hardly expect their children to practice a faith denied to their mother.

But she argued this from a purely feminist and academic point of view. She had accepted the conventional wisdom and gone along with the opinion of the community because she had grown up with these precepts. She had never doubted that she would marry a Parsee.

Till now these issues had not affected her. But with Feroza's happiness at stake and her strengthening affection for David, Zareen wondered about it. How could a religion whose Prophet urged his followers to spread the Truth of his message in the holy Gathas — the songs of Zarathustra — prohibit conversion and throw her daughter out of the faith?

Zareen knew there was a controversy raging round these issues in Bombay, as well as in Britain, Canada, and America, where the Parsees had migrated in droves in the past few years.

Bombay had sixty thousand Parsees — fifty percent of the total world population of her community. Zareen had all along believed that the Parsee Panchayat in Bombay was the natural
center of authority on community matters. She knew it also had an inclination to be conservative.

Tucked away in Lahore, Zareen had not felt directly involved. She was vaguely confident that the controversy would be resolved in an enlightened manner (after all, her community was educated and progressive) and that she could live with its decisions whichever way they went.

She was not so sure anymore and felt herself suddenly aligned with the thinking of the liberals and reformists. It eased her heart to think that a debate on these issues was taking place.

Perhaps the teenagers in Lahore were right. The Zoroastrian Anjuman in Karachi and Bombay should move with the times that were sending them to the New World. Bunny's image materialized before her with startling lucidity as her niece tossed her ponytail and said, “For God's sake! You're carrying on as if Feroza's dead! She's only getting married.”

Of course. And to a nice boy. Zareen was sanguine. The various Anjumans would have to introduce minor reforms if they wished their tiny community to survive.

Although Shirley and Laura occasionally roamed the house in shorts, David, warned by Feroza, kept his hairy legs modestly concealed. There were other strictures they prudently continued to observe, and David, nosing his way timidly on the surface of another culture, was entirely guided by Feroza. Neither smoked before Zareen, and both were careful not to give the slightest hint of their more advanced physical intimacies.

During the second week of Zareen's stay, they hesitantly introduced her to some of their friends from the Unitarian Church Society, cautiously explaining parts of the Unitarian doctrine to Zareen. In her liberal frame of mind, Zareen found their outlook reasonable, and Feroza and David's friends as charming as they found her.

And then, in the third week of her visit, a spate of anxious letters from Pakistan arrived, recalling Zareen to her mission.

By themselves the letters from her family would not have
upset Zareen so much. But Freny had enclosed copies of two pamphlets titled “WARNING” and “NOTICE.” One was from the Athornan Mandal, which was the Parsee priest's association in Bombay headed by Dastur Feroze Kotwal, and the other was from the Bombay Zoroastrian Jashan Committee.

Zareen scanned them, her fingers suddenly trembling. A terrible fear for her daughter gripped her heart. Her first inclination was to tear up the sheets. Then she folded them into a tight wad and buried them in the bottom drawer of her dresser.

Zareen's sleep became restless. Her dreams were crowded with the presence of outraged kin pointing long, rebuking fingers. As if prodded by an ominous finger, she bolted upright in bed one night, her pulse pounding. She looked at the watch on the side table; it was three o'clock. She felt something was terribly amiss and, with a shock, realized that Feroza was not in her cot. For the first time, Zareen suspected that her daughter probably slept with David. Tying her scarf round her head, she began to pray.

Zareen knew what she must do. However admirable and appealing David was, however natural to the stimulating and carefree environment, he would deprive her daughter of her faith, her heritage, her family, and her community. She would be branded an adulteress and her children pronounced illegitimate. She would be accused of committing the most heinous sacrileges. Cut off from her culture and her surroundings like a fish in shallow waters, her child would eventually shrivel up. And her dread for Feroza altered her opinion of David.

The next day Feroza and David at once sensed the change in Zareen's mood. They were surprised how fragile their happiness was, how vulnerable they were. Linking Zareen's shift in temper to the bundle of letters that had arrived from Pakistan, Feroza wished the mail had been lost.

Zareen's face grew more and more solemn as the morning advanced, and the little frown-line between her eyes settled into a deeper groove. Feroza, after a few attempts to rally her mother had failed, became equally solemn. David's misgivings launched
their customary attacks. He skulked about the garage and the backyard, trying to keep out of everybody's way. There were muffled sounds of an altercation from Laura and Shirley's room. Zareen's ill humor and fear had contaminated the house. Zareen packed Feroza off to the grocery store with a list of things to buy and, once she was safely out of the way, phoned Aban.

Aban and Manek called Zareen on the weekends, when the rates were low. Their conversations had been pleasant, restricted to questions about what Zareen had been seeing and doing, how Aban, eight months pregnant, was faring, and to news of the family in Pakistan.

Earlier Zareen had told Manek the purpose of her precipitate visit, and Manek had advised, “Just keep your cool. I'm sure it will blow over.” And Zareen, excited by the adventures of shopping, eating, and sightseeing, had been content to let things ride.

This morning, although it was a work day and an expensive time to call, Zareen phoned Aban and poured out her many misgivings. Aban, still not feeling that she could interfere in a matter so personal, listened sympathetically and advised, “It might be better if you call Manek. He understands Feroza and might offer some suggestions.” She gave her Manek's phone number at work.

Manek was surprised when his secretary told him that his sister was on the line. “Everything all right?” he asked anxiously, and Zareen started weeping. “I don't know what to do,” she said between her sobs. And pulling herself together, she expressed her anxiety and feelings.

Manek listened to her with growing impatience. “Couldn't the matter wait till evening? Do you know how much this call is costing?”

“Damn the cost,” Zareen almost shrieked. “It's a question of Feroza's entire happiness. Is that all you can think of?”

“Look,” Manek said, “I still think if you leave things alone, the romance will die a natural death.”

“I don't think it will,” Zareen said with conviction. “You should see the way they're carrying on. I wouldn't be surprised if they
eloped and got married secretly.”

“Feroza is a big girl now,” Manek said. “She's not a fool. She knows what she's doing. If she really likes the guy so much, there's not much you can do. After all, she's spent four years in America. Our young people are bound to marry out. You know so many already have. I can only make a suggestion. I think the best thing would be to accept the fact with good grace. After all, David sounds like a fine man.”